Today, nearly 40% of patients admitted to acute care hospitals in the United States experience either hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia, both serious medical conditions. Many of these patients have diabetes while others have fluctuating blood sugars due to trauma, drug reactions, stress and other factors. Nurses and doctors managing these patients manually calculate insulin doses using complex paper protocols.
Manual calculation may not be accurate due to human error, which can lead to patient safety issues. Different institutions use multiple and sometimes conflicting protocols to manually calculate an insulin dosage. Moreover, the protocols may include extra paperwork that nurses and physicians have to manage, which in turn leads to workflow inefficiencies, additional operating costs, and employee satisfaction issues. SCIP (Surgical Care Improvement Project) scores, length of stay, readmission and even mortality rates adversely affect sub-optimal glycemic management.
The prevalent method of regulating continuous intravenous insulin infusion is by using a set of written instructions, known as a paper protocol. Paper protocols often involve a tree of conditional statements and some use of tables of numbers, for which a given blood glucose value dictates the use of a different column of insulin rates. The complexity of these paper protocols multiplies the probability of error by the nurses using them. These errors can lead to hypoglycemic events.